- May 2023
Overview
May is the start of Aave Grants DAO’s seventh quarter, marking the start of the second half of our renewal voted on at the end of January 2023.
This update covers AGD’s work completed in May and comes after the recently posted April 2023 & Halfway Updates post.
Grants Summary
Total numbers for the grants program’s spending are listed below spanning from the program start up until the end of May.
- Total Grant Applications Received: 1878
- Total Applications Approved: 235
- Acceptance Rate:
- written(stage 1): 13%
- video call(stage 2): 74%
- Total Amount Disbursed: $4,757,253
- Complete Grant Payments: 83%
- In-progress/Incomplete Grant Payments: 16%
- Amount and Quantity Approved by Category:
- Applications and integrations (103) ($2,559,066),
- Code audits (3) ($82,000),
- Committees & DAOs that serve Aave’s ecosystem (19) ($693,780),
- Community (marketing and educational) (51) ($683,550),
- Developer tooling (13) ($445,000),
- Events / Hackathons / Sponsorships (14) ($186,000),
- Other (12) ($294,900),
- Protocol development (20) ($479,200)
May Approved Grants
During May we received 105 grant applications and awarded seven projects funding that are contributing to Aave’s ecosystem. The seven grants awarded during May amounted to a cumulative $198,500 in funding spread across three of our standard grant categories with a median grant size of $20k (dashboard image thanks to @Llama).
The list below covers what projects were funded as well as what they are building and how they plan to use the awarded funds:
-
Grant Name - $ total grant amount(payment type) - grant type
- grant description - “grantee self-description”
- use of funds
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Sommelier Finance - $50,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
- “The development of the Aave V3 adaptor for Sommelier enables the creation of state-of-the-art DeFi strategies that make use of Aave V3 for lending and borrowing. The Real Yield ETH vault, built by Seven Seas Capital and DeFine Logic Labs on Sommelier, uses Aave V3 to do leveraged staking on cbETH, wstETH, and rETH and has already amassed almost $4M in TVL.”
- funds will cover development and audit costs for the adapter Aave V3 adaptor
- “The development of the Aave V3 adaptor for Sommelier enables the creation of state-of-the-art DeFi strategies that make use of Aave V3 for lending and borrowing. The Real Yield ETH vault, built by Seven Seas Capital and DeFine Logic Labs on Sommelier, uses Aave V3 to do leveraged staking on cbETH, wstETH, and rETH and has already amassed almost $4M in TVL.”
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Warden Finance | Liquidation backtesting tool - $40,000(tranche) - developer tooling
- “The Aave liquidation backtesting tool will allow anyone in the Aave community to validate the robustness of liquidation penalties for all supported assets on all Aave deployments.
For a given asset and a given liquidation size over a specific time period, the tool will output the historical distribution of liquidation costs (gas costs, oracle price skew, slippage, fees).”- funds with go toward 2 - 3 months of engineering work
- “The Aave liquidation backtesting tool will allow anyone in the Aave community to validate the robustness of liquidation penalties for all supported assets on all Aave deployments.
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Xenophon Labs - $30,000(tranche) - protocol development
- Xenophon Labs plans to perform an analysis of the Aave Safety Module similar to the one they did for dYdX’s originally Aave-based Safety Module. With this grant, they plan to complete two deliverables:
Deliverable 1. A research paper that determines an optimal value for the slashing percentage. This will be mathematical in nature.
Deliverable 2. A forum post — and governance vote, once the safety module is in a state that requires it — providing a recommendation for how to optimize the slashing percentage. Although our aim is to be practical, funding is not contingent on a successful governance vote.- funds will go toward the analysis and share improvement suggestions of the current safety module
- Xenophon Labs plans to perform an analysis of the Aave Safety Module similar to the one they did for dYdX’s originally Aave-based Safety Module. With this grant, they plan to complete two deliverables:
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Mosaic - $25,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
- “Mosaic will benefit from the Aave Grants DAO grant to continue building its data analytics platform, provision Aave Liquidity data, create a model from that data, and generate insights from the activity of Aave LPs.”
- funds will go toward Mosaic launching an MVP along with a campaign integrating 3+ AGD projects into their product
- “Mosaic will benefit from the Aave Grants DAO grant to continue building its data analytics platform, provision Aave Liquidity data, create a model from that data, and generate insights from the activity of Aave LPs.”
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Brahma.fi - $20,000(full) - applications and integrations
- “Console will make it easier for users to onboard to AAVE, improve security, and enable non-custodial asset management through Safe. Allowing on-chain leverage management using Gelato, will increase the adoption of GHO. Console streamlines the GHO minting and position rebalancing process on AAVE, directly from users’ Gnosis Safe, eliminating custodial risk and the need for fund pooling.
By offering automated monitoring and risk management, it enhances capital efficiency and safety, targeting improved multisig UX in DeFi.”- funds will go specifically toward the audit budget for their Aave integration on the Console product
- “Console will make it easier for users to onboard to AAVE, improve security, and enable non-custodial asset management through Safe. Allowing on-chain leverage management using Gelato, will increase the adoption of GHO. Console streamlines the GHO minting and position rebalancing process on AAVE, directly from users’ Gnosis Safe, eliminating custodial risk and the need for fund pooling.
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DeFi Simulator - $18,500(full) - applications and integrations
- “DeFi Simulator will internationalize its Aave debt simulator to allow people across the globe to understand their Aave health factor and borrowing power in their local language and currency.”
- funds will go directly toward adding support for other currencies and languages allowing the tool to reach a broader audience. 0xcazador gives a detailed explanation in his forum post about the project here.
- “DeFi Simulator will internationalize its Aave debt simulator to allow people across the globe to understand their Aave health factor and borrowing power in their local language and currency.”
- Credit Delegation Marketplace | Milestone 2 - $15,000(tranche) - applications and integrations
Grantee Updates
Some recent updates from the Aave grantees are as follows:
- Silent Protocol a past grantee formerly approved under the name ‘Projecteuanthe’ posted a thread anticipating how they plan to bring private DeFi to users of Aave soon!
- Anthias also posted a thread announcing their new tool for DeFi risk management called Anthias Liquip Score. In short, it is a new method of measuring liquidation probability which they believe will prove a more effective metric for assessing a borrower’s liquidation risk than the traditional health factor. Read their pdf report for a deep-dive explanation.
- Butter gave an update on the forum reporting on recent delegate activity spanning from May 2 - May 16.
- BEN shared their “Intro to DAO Governance” video series which was funded back in October
Ongoing Updates
Most of our notable ongoing updates have been put in our recent AGD Renewal 4: April 2023 & Halfway Updates post but to mention a few. In the coming quarter, AGD plans to start experimenting with offering direct bounties to the community for building specific requests i.e. RFPs so look out for those. That is all for our update for the month of May. Like always we are happy to include any other updates or stats the community would like to see in these posts, just let us know below.